I spend most of the this morning catching up on news – I haven’t thought about the environs out side of the 494/694 loop since before the holidays. Everything seemed fairly typical, no surprises, until I read about (and watched a movie of) last week’s gigantic TVA coal ash spill near Knoxville on a Minnesota professor’s blog. 

Crazy that its not all over the national news, maybe it was last week and I missed it. I did find a couple articles on the Chattanooga Times Free Press. And here’s the TVA’s page of shame.

Houses were swept away, and toxins are oozing down tributaries toward the Tennessee River. The utility companies are saying the drinking water hasn’t been contaminated yet – but I don’t think I would drink it. And if I have my rivers right, the Tennessee flows in the Ohio, which flows into the Mississippi – so there’s a local-ish connection.